What drives Instagram usage? User motives and personality traits

Abstract

Purpose

Social networking sites (SNS) have become extensively used communication environments as a result of the advancements in online technologies, and among various SNS platforms, Instagram is currently the most prominent image-based network. Since usage motives for alternative SNS environments with different outstanding benefits are expected to vary, this study has focused mainly on extracting the key context-specific usage motives of Instagram. Another purpose of this study is to figure out personality traits differences among Instagram user segments.

Design/methodology/approach

An online survey was designed, and a total of 690 fully completed questionnaires was collected, and 507 of the respondents were Instagram users. After conducting factor analysis, six main usage motive categories have been revealed and named as self-expression, recording, socialization, recreation, creativity, and prying.

Findings

Instagram users have been clustered as passionate, distant, and spectator users based on their usage motives. Ultimately, personality differences among these clusters have been explored using the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and two additional traits, social interaction anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation. Openness to experience, social interaction anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation were found to be significantly different among these clusters.

Originality/value

Discovering the motives of SNS usage, segmenting users based on these motives, and then portraying the personality traits of each segment gives important clues about how SNSs can better design their interfaces and generate content for attracting users in different segments.

Citation

Kocak, E., Nasir, V.A. and Turker, H.B. (2020), "What drives Instagram usage? User motives and personality traits", Online Information Review, Vol. 44 No. 3, pp. 625-643. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-08-2019-0260